This didn’t occur to me right away.
This week, Mitt Romney’s campaign pushed a foreign policy
adviser, Richard Grenell, into resigning. Grenell, who worked loyally for the
Bush Administration, had been told to “lay low”.
Grenell is gay and out, and reportedly supports same-sex marriage
rights. Religious conservatives screamed, and so now the guy who worked for our
country’s ambassador to the UN is no longer working for Romney.
It was a comment on this post that made me think of
something.
A little over four years ago, then-Senator Barack Obama
made a speech in Philadelphia where he confronted head on the conversation
about race that was bubbling all around his candidacy. The speech needed to
happen, especially in response to videos of the Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright,
making inflammatory remarks.
The conventional thing to do would’ve been to ignore
Wright until something from the next news cycle replaced him, but that’s not
what Obama did. Instead, he made this speech, a true “let’s cut the rhetoric
and all say what we mean” moment that made me finally decide to vote for him.
In the parlance of people who do what I do for a living, he pivoted, taking
control of the conversation again by reframing it.
Why didn’t Romney pivot? If he’d stuck to his guns, kept
on the man he’d thought enough of to hire in the first place, and told the
religious right to get over themselves (what are they going to do, vote for
Obama?), Romney would’ve demonstrated such incredible leadership. Instead of
sweeping Grenell under the rug, Romney easily could’ve pulled him into the
spotlight as a way to start a conversation about his fairly moderate record. He
could’ve said, “You know what, I’m glad you asked – yes, Richard is gay, and
that’s totally irrelevant to the job I hired him to do.” But instead Romney
went with “Richard? Who’s Richard? We don’t have a Richard here. See?”
Why am I going to put in the most important job in the
world a guy who can’t even stand up to a shrinking bloc in the party who’s
nomination he’s already sewn up? The president’s most significant job is hiring
people – from the thousands of appointments he makes to staff federal agencies
to Supreme Court justices. Whoever’s in that chair needs a pretty thick skin.
Moreover, it’s stupid politically. Romney just chose
anti-gay fundamentalists over moderates and independents, who are usually the
ones that decide presidential elections. I want my president to be smarter than
that. I also expect him to have a spine.
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